Five quit over ‘experiment’ at NHS children’s gender clinic

BRITAIN’S only NHS gender clinic for children was yesterday accused of being an ‘unregulated live experiment’ on vulnerable youngsters.

Five specialist clinicians said they had resigned from the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic because of fears over the treatment of children who identified as transgender.

They raised concerns that some children had been wrongly diagnosed and sent for life-changing medical intervention without thorough assessment of other possibilities.

The medical experts said they had felt under pressure to refer youngsters for treatment including hormone blockers even though they had not always believed such intervention was in the child’s best interests.

Fears were also raised that some children who identified as transgender were in fact struggling with their sexuality but were still referred for hormone treatment. The specialist clinicians questioned if some youngsters said they wanted treatment because they found it easier to identify as transgender rather than accept they were gay.

One male clinician said: ‘It feels like conversion therapy for gay children... I frequently had cases where people started identifying as trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay.’

An Oxford professor said there was ‘ low- quality evidence’ or ‘no evidence at all’ about the use of drugs to treat children and teenagers diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre of Evidence-based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said the lack of evidence surrounding the treatment ‘largely means an unregulated live experiment on children’.

Five specialists spoke anonymously to The Times after resigning from the GIDS in the last three years.

At least 18 clinical staff have apparently resigned over this period. One said she had suffered nightmares about the work, and voiced fears that young people who had undergone treatment could change their minds in adulthood.

She said: ‘In the future I think there will be lots and lots of detransitioners who feel their bodies were mutilated as young people and who will ask, why did you let me do this? It is very disturbing.’ Another said: ‘I felt for the last two years what kept me in the job was the sense there was a huge number of children in danger and I was there to protect them from the service, from the inside.’

The five specialists were responsible for deciding which youngsters should be given hormone blockers to halt their sexual development.

They said they had faced pressure from parents to refer children for hormone blockers, despite evidence linking the treatment to infertility and sexual dysfunction. The treatment is physically reversible if they are discontinued, but the majority of those who take the blockers go on to irreversible hormone treatments later, and some go on to have gender reassignment surgery as adults.

The North London clinic, run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, said an independent review had not identified ‘immediate issues in relation to patient safety or failings in the overall approach taken by the service’. It added that its staff took time and care at every stage of assessment to ensure children and adolescents understood the potential consequences of their choices.

The Department of Health said the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust was ‘subject to inspections, monitoring and regulation’.

‘Halt sexual development’